James Gunn Shows Off His Stack of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Storyboards

There is no denying that James Gunn has been a busy boy lately, and fresh off The Suicide Squad he has been hard at work on the Peacemaker spin-off series post production at the same time as entering pre-production on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Just to prove the point of how busy he has been, the director shared an image on his Twitter account of an enormous pile of hand drawn storyboards for what seems to be his final outing for the Guardians of the Galaxy. Although the initial tease doesn’t give any hints as to what their content is, Gunn followed up his post with some additional shots of actual storyboards.

“Stack of hand drawn storyboards I just finished from the past few days for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” James Gunn commented. “This represents 12 pages of script & will be the foundation for this section of the film. Designing the film like this is the most important part of my job at this point.”

RELATED: Dave Bautista Says Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Will Wrap Up the Series

In reply to the tweet, Gunn was asked if he would ever considering publishing his storyboards, similar to what has been done in the past with Star Wars soryboards, but Gunn wasn’t so sure about the idea, citing his lack of artistic talent as the reason. “I would if my storyboards were anywhere near that good,” he said. “Mine are not beautiful but they do the trick for helping me to remember exactly how I pictured every shot & the movement from shot to shot.”

Across a series of posts, he continued to go into very specific detail about his storyboarding process and how it aids him and others during the filming of the movie. “A numbered, written shot descriptor accompanies every storyboard. In these, I’ll also describe notes for the stunt team, the production designers, costumers, & so on, as well as reminding me of notes to give my actors (also sometimes alternate dialogue I’ll throw out on set.) This book of drawings & descriptors becomes my film Bible, which is more important to me than the script. For me writing a script is often just me trying to describe what I see visually, so this is closer to the truth of how I see the story (the film itself is even closer). Every shot in my movies is hand drawn first. That’s at least 2,500 shots or so per my recent films. Many of the shots – about 1/3 – take anywhere from 2 to 10 cards or more – because I’m drawing the movement. So I probably end up with about 3,000 cards.”

When you consider how much work goes into the storyboarding of the movie, it is surprising that Gunn has the time to keep fans up to date as much as he does on Twitter. For anyone who loves to follow the filmmaking process, there is no better person to follow for the amount of behind the scenes information that he puts out. With a long way to go in the filming of the third solo outing for the Guardians, we can expect to see a lot more like this to come in the future.

Guardians of The Galaxy Vol 3 is currently expected to arrive in theaters on May 5th, 2023.

Topics: Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Guardians of the Galaxy